Official Report 203KB pdf
We move to agenda item 2. Are we agreed that items 4, 6 and 7 should be taken in private?
Why do we have to take item 7 in private?
It is a draft report on a petition, so it is available only to committee members until we agree it, when it can go into the public domain. We must discuss the contents of the report in private.
If a petition comes before the committee and we agree to discuss the issue in private until such time as we say that it is not to be kept private, that means that it will always be discussed in private.
When we write a report, the discussion of its contents must be in private.
When the petition came to the committee, if we had not agreed to hear it in private, it would have been dealt with in public.
It is one thing to discuss in public how we want to deal with a petition or any other matter, but once we decide that we will produce a report, we must be able to deliberate on it in private. The draft paper remains private to the committee members who must sign up to the report. That discussion must be in private. The matter comes back into the public domain when the report is produced.
I understand that. I just wonder why those discussions are always in private.
For the record, when the petition came to the committee we took evidence on it in public. I say that in case anyone reading the Official Report thinks that we have always dealt with the petition behind closed doors.
The issue is not the content of the report, but the mechanism by which the committee comes to conclusions on it. The practice is that when a committee is preparing a report in the name of the committee, the draft report is dealt with in private.
Meeting continued in private.
Meeting resumed in public.
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Deputy Convener